For much of the past year I have been working on a game. No, not just a game, I’m been working on change. There are 122 million children in the world today who can’t read or write[1]. They will grow up to join the 775 million adults who can’t. Together that’s almost one billion people who are effectively shut off from the information age. How many of them could make the world a better place, given even half a chance?

Snaps are a great way to get the most up to date applications on your desktop without putting the security or stability or your system at risk. I’ve been snapping up a bunch of things lately and the potential this new paradigm offers is going to be revolutionary. Unfortunately nothing comes for free, and the security of snaps comes with some necessary tradeoffs like isolation and confinement, which reduces some of the power and flexibility we’ve become used to as Linux users.

I’ve had a Nexus 4 since 2013, and I’ve been using it to test out desktop convergence (where you run a desktop environment from the phone) ever since that feature landed just over a year ago. Usually that meant plugging it into my TV via HDMI to make sure it automatically switched to the larger screen, and playing a bit with the traditional windowed-mode of Unity 8, or checking on adaptive layouts in some of the apps. I’ve also run it for hours on end as a demo at conferences such as SCaLE, FOSSETCON, OSCON and SELF. But through all that, I’ve never used it as an actual replacement for my laptop. Until now.

During theUbuntu Online Summitlast week, my colleague Daniel Holbach came up with what he called a “10 day challenge” to some of the engineering manager directing the convergence work in Ubuntu. The idea is simple, try and use only the Unity 8 desktop for 10 working days (two weeks). I thought this was a great way to really identify how close it is to being usable by most Ubuntu users, as well as finding the bugs that cause the most pain in making the switch. So on Friday of last week, withUOSover, I took up the challenge.